Sunday, February 3, 2008

It time for another night of Movies With Maureen®. While movie allusions are a common feature of Maureen Dowd columns, sometimes the combination of too much late night MSNBC and Starz causes her movie mania to go into overdrive. The last time was as part of her Dubya of Arabia coverage. This time her film focus is on the Democratic nomination race.

She starts out by invoking the love/hate relationship between Rick and Captain Renault in Casablanca.

And so it is with Barack and Hillary. Thursday night was not the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Just a beautiful, dare we say, fairy tale.

The fairy tale of course being Bill Clinton’s take on Barry’s Iraq policy. Dowd also echoes her invocation of Seven Days in May back in December by saying that with Bill in the East Wing, the Oval Office will be off-limits to any Veep usurpation.

There won’t be any Dick Cheney-style coup in Hillary’s White House.

But if Bill is the Big Dog, Hillary is the ultimate toothy terror, Bruce The Shark from Jaws, devouring anything in her path to the presidency. Obama will need more than a few rides on Teddy’s sailboat to sink her ambitions.

Team Obama refers to the Clinton campaign as “Jaws” because “just when things are quiet, they keep trying to come back and capsize the boat.”

The movie Mean Girls (which is a MoDo metaphor explored fuller earlier this week) was based on a parental advice book called Queen Bees and Wannabes which posits that in any social pecking order there is only room for one Alpha Hillary and she will lie, gossip, and scheme as much as necessary to keep her standing as Queen of the Cafeteria.

Maureen then gives a very lengthy anecdote about a showdown that takes place on a runway rather than at recess, but there are just as many accusations of back-stabbing, vicious gossiping, insincere apologies, and arguing over who said what to whom and when as any Lindsey Lohan movie.

Hillary sent word to Obama that she wanted to talk to him. Obama’s aides figured that she wanted to make a pro forma apology for the comments of Billy Shaheen, the Clinton co-chairman in New Hampshire, who had told The Washington Post that Republicans would pounce on Obama’s confessions of cocaine and marijuana use in his late teens. Shaheen would step down the next day, but Camp Obama did not think the slam was a mere slip of the tongue.

In front of her plane, Hillary apologized to her rival about Shaheen. Obama replied that he was concerned at the pattern of insinuations and attacks from her supporters and that a message needed to be sent from the top that sharp attacks were not, as Hillary had put it, “the fun part.”

Mean Girls use proxies and lackeys to do their dirty work and the Clintons are no exception.

He brought up another recent example: the Clinton volunteer in Iowa who had been asked to leave after forwarding sleazy e-mail falsely claiming that Obama was a Muslim.

The rest of the story involves physical contact that almost starts a cat-fight complete with name-calling and hair-pulling. But the Mean Girls/Queen Bee call-out also segues into the Clinton Royalty Metaphor® of the week with jostle/joust just close enough together to trigger an Alliteration Alert®:

As Queen Bee of the Clinton hive, Hillary has created a regal force field that can be breached only with permission, so something that wasn’t even a jostle was perceived as a joust.

This recap of the animosity between former colleagues is meant to show that any show of congeniality on the part of the candidates is just Oscar-worthy acting.

But on Thursday, when he leaned down to whisper and put his hand on her shoulder, she looked up at him with a glowing smile. They really should have taken home gold statuettes.

And for Dowd, Super Tuesday will have all the glamour and drama of the Academy Awards.

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